Social Media Campaign Review: How Garnier Fructis Launched Alia Bhatt As Their Brand Ambassador on Social Media

Branding is an exercise which every brand needs and does. With the exponential shift to digital, we are seeing brands adapt their strategies quickly to create various digital exclusive strategies.

The latest to join the band wagon of exclusive digital launch is Garnier Fructis which recently launched Alia Bhatt as its first ever ambassador in India. Garnier Fructis is a strong brand in the social media space and it’s no wonder that they have followed this route.

The announcement was made through a digital film where Alia talks about her favorite hair memories and importance of hair. Choosing Alia Bhatt as their ambassador fits right in with Garnier Fructis’ brand image and strategy who finds its target in more or less the similar audiences.

Objective

The campaign was launched with the objective to create buzz about the revealing of Garnier Fructis’ first ever Indian brand ambassador, riding the social wave, teasing their audiences to guess who would be the new face of the brand. Post the reveal, the aim was to build on Alia’s stardom and help keep the audiences engaged.

Execution

Launched on the 7th of June, the campaign used Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as its primary platforms and was backed up with a site which was specially designed and developed for this campaign.

The campaign was executed in three major phases. The Build, The Reveal and The Post Reveal. Let’s have a look at each of the individual phase in detail:

The Build

The build phase is where the brand sent out feelers about the upcoming announcement and created some excitement around the announcement and upcoming campaign. The campaign was launched with the following posts across networks:

After the teasers, they started a “guessing game” to draw audiences into the conversation, by sending out #10ThingsAboutHer as clues and encouraging audiences to write in with their thoughts about who they thought would be the new face of Garnier Fructis.

Slowly but steadily building some interest and momentum on social networks, the brand followed up with a final hint.

Letting the audience guess, and keeping them in the dark for the remainder of the day to let the excitement simmer to make way for a delicious little reveal.

The Reveal

The next day, Alia Bhatt was launched as the brand ambassador using a digital film in which she spoke about her #HairAffair and the importance of her hair.

An official tweet was sent out from Alia’s account to make this announcement, which received 166 retweets.

With the reveal, the social sphere exploded with reactions from various people and fan clubs. All Garnier had to do was look out and retweet:

The Post Reveal

In order to keep building on the momentum it had gained during the build and reveal stages, the brand had planned various activities, contests and hashtags. The first one was the contest where Alia invited followers to share their #HairAffair stories with her.

This received an enormous response from woman across the globe, with woman sharing their love for their hair with the world.

By creating a site especially for this campaign, the brand was able to showcase all of the #HairAffair stories in one neat package:

Ensuring that they spread word about Alia and the whole concept, they posted about the contest across platforms, encouraging people with Alia’s snippets of #HairAffair stories

Inviting some of the well followed users to participate in the contest.

Once the contest timelines had run its course, the brand invited followers to write welcome messages to Alia, welcoming her to the Garnier Fructis family, with the hashtag #WriteAMessageToAlia

Tweeters replied back with their messages and spoke about why they liked the fact that Alia was the face of Garnier Fructis.

In their latest activity, the brand is encouraging followers to share their #HairAffair stories to get personalized illustrations of themselves:

Positives

In all of Garnier’s campaigns one thing to note is that they are well-thought out and planned in advance. They have all their bases covered and understand the pulse of their audience and how they are likely to react. This helps them create a personalized experience for their followers.

Considering the fact this is an exclusive digital launch, the campaign is definitely gaining a lot of response from the followers and is gaining momentum as you read this.

The campaign has combined multiple social content strategies to create an all-round winner. Using contests, hashtags, illustrations and even having Alia Bhatt tweet multiple times.

Scope for Improvement

The campaign has been excellent thus far with only a couple of minor missteps. The campaign would have garnered more interest and attracted more eyeballs had they spent more time on the build phase. Teasing the audiences for a few more days in order to really get the excitement on a different high. The reveal was done rather quickly and did not get enough time to brew in the followers minds.

Even though we understand the strategy of using different hashtags in different phases of the campaign, I believe it would have been far more beneficial for the brand to use one consistent hashtag especially since this has been a long campaign. A single hashtag would have the possibility to reaching a trending status and increase the reach of the campaign.

Ending Note

You have to hand one thing to this brand, they know their audience. Across all of their campaigns they have shown remarkable foresight in terms of how the campaign should pan out and what direction they want to lead the campaign into. Effortlessly weaving through one campaign to the next without the audiences ever feeling disconnected.

Likesh Bhambhwani is 24 year old wannabe restauranteur. His interests vary from Design to Digital to Writing. He gets his Design and Digital fix from his current role as a Digital Solutioning and User Experience Design specialist in a gigantic IT company. He's a part time poet and a full time dreamer. A hidden genius and an exposed idiot. Follow him on his blog @AutolatricStupe